“Of the Month” June 2010

Link of the Month:
Dinerwood
A review blog for all of the Los Angeles area’s best and worst diners, breakfast joints and coffee shops. Established May 2007. Written by my pal Mike T., this blog is frequently funny and always honest. Mike has a real love of good diners and good coffee, and this is always an entertaining (and informative if you’re ever in the outskirts of L.A.) blog to read.

Album of the Month:
Three Ninjas is Smarter Than a Lettuce
The 2nd full-length album from nerdcore maestro Three Ninjas shows remarkable technical mastery. Three Ninjas’s sampledelica style is very original and unexpected, as is his vocal style which hovers between spoken-word (Red Underwears) and rhythmically-dynamic hip-hop (Five Finger Discount). There are some problems with inconsistent mixing—the vocals in some songs are mixed too low to be easily deciphered, which is a shame when the nerdcore lyrics are so good, and the overall volume changes from song to song making it so that you have to manually adjust it to keep them all at the same level—making it seem more like a song collection than a coherent album. But the songs cover a huge range, from intensely personal hip-hop songs to fully-sung love songs to incredibly fun and silly songs (hello, Some Li’l Dude). Highly recommended.

DVD of the Month:
Farscape: The Complete Series
This was an easy choice for my DVD of the month considering that it has consumed basically ALL OF MY FREE TIME since I got the DVD set for my birfday. I devoured all 88 episodes in less than a month. This late, great Sci-Fi series about a test pilot/scientist who gets shot through a wormhole to a distant part of the galaxy succeeds, like most great shows, on the strength of its core characters. It is not without its problems—there were far too many episodes about some something-or-other damaging the ship and threatening to kill them all (especially in the final season, where they seemed really out of place)—but it is an incredibly compelling, dramatic, and wrlyly funny TV show. Don’t forget to watch the movie that serves as the series finale!